Page 48 of Shadowblood Souls: The Complete Series

“Yes, that was the inspiration for the design, although it wasn’t my idea to imprint it on you.

” Her mouth tightens again. “But as for what and why… Many years ago, when I was younger than you, I found out that there are creatures that enter this world that are pure shadow. They don’t bleed red at all, only that dark haze. ”

“Creatures?” Zian prods.

Engel swirls a whisk in the pot with a faint clinking as it taps the sides.

“All the things from fairytales and folklore, all the monsters and myths we’d have liked to believe were only made up.

They sneak into our world and blend in among us as well as they can, using us, preying on us…

” She sucks in a sharp breath. “And barely anyone knows.”

Uneasiness prickles over my skin. Monsters and myths… with powers like ours?

“But some people do know,” Jacob says. “ You know.”

“Yes. And those who know push back as well as we can. My sister and I joined a group of those aware, under the name the Company of Light. Light to combat the shadows. We thought it was very clever.”

Engel’s expression darkens. “After some time, it became clear to me that we couldn’t do enough. Even if everyone in the world knew, it might not be enough to protect humanity when the fiends we were up against had so much strength and were so difficult to destroy.”

“So you made us,” Andreas says with a distant quality to his voice. My head jerks toward him, but his gaze is distant too, still with the reddish glow over his irises.

He must be talking about something he’s seen in her memories.

He inhales sharply and goes on. “You thought we could fight them if you made us strong enough.”

If it bothers Engel that Andreas has picked that information up from her mind, she doesn’t show her discomfort.

“Some members of the Company had been capturing the shadow creatures and running tests on them, experimenting with the essence they’re constructed of, toward a goal I suspected was untenable.

But I saw the possibility for taking some of what made the fiends such formidable foes and enhancing humans with it. ”

Jacob’s mouth twists. “So, we have some of that monstrousness—that essence—mixed up in us?”

“Yes. I wanted to create humans who could match our enemies while standing alongside us.” A trace of wryness colors Engel’s tone. “Unfortunately that required starting from scratch at infancy, but this war has always been a long game.”

A lot of things suddenly make so much more sense than they did before.

“That’s why we’ve had all that training,” I burst out.

“Keeping us physically strong, making sure we could fight, practicing our powers.” I’m not sure what the missions were for—maybe the little tasks they sent us on worked against these shadow creatures in some way we didn’t realize?

Did the guardians justify the more torturous parts of the training thinking they were preparing us to face something even worse?

Andreas frowns. “But why did the other guardians make you leave? It was your project—you set everything up… You haven’t seen us since we were around ten, it looks like?”

“And we haven’t seen you at all since… since as long as we can remember,” Dominic adds.

Engel whisks the heating chocolate mixture some more, trickles of steam starting to rise from the pot.

“Yes. Over time and with changing circumstances, I came to have different ideas about how the project should proceed than most of my colleagues did. About what our specific goals should be, about how you should be treated.”

A slight edge creeps into her voice. She wasn’t happy about how they treated us.

“But if you were the one who started everything, couldn’t you decide for the others?” Zian says.

Engel sighs. “I didn’t have all the power—I’d needed to seek funding and guidance. I was overridden, limited in my involvement and then pushed out completely, other than when they feel the need to consult me.”

The bitterness in her tone sends another quiver of uneasiness through me, but I can’t explain why. It sounds as if they treated her badly—why shouldn’t she be upset?

The question tumbles out of my mouth. “What did you want to happen to us?”

Did she see how cruelly the others were treating us and want to set us free? Is that why she’s seemed so calm about us showing up like this?

Her smile returns, appearing to confirm my guess. “I’ll be able to show you. Now that you’re here, I can see my intentions through.”

“Is there a way to take out the shadow parts of us?” Dominic asks abruptly. “If we don’t—if we’d rather not?—”

The shoulder area of his parka shivers where his tentacles must have twitched underneath.

“I’m afraid not,” Engel says, “or I’d happily do that for you. But the shadow essence is entwined with your genetic code. It would be like attempting to carve the musical talent out of a violin prodigy or the coordination out of a natural athlete.”

Dominic’s face falls, and Zian’s expression tenses too. My gut clenches.

If there’s no way to remove the thing that’s been growing inside me, trying to take me over…

Jacob crosses his arms over his chest. “What do we do now? How do you see things going from here? The guardians will probably figure out we came up this way soon, and?—”

Engel pauses in her stirring and cuts off his concerned statement with a dismissive wave of her hand.

“You don’t need to worry about them . When they mentioned you were roaming around, I told them I doubted you’d have any interest in me, that they shouldn’t waste their resources up here.

The nearest reinforcements are hours away.

I knew they’d only want to recapture you. ”

Her comments should be reassuring, but my apprehension rises more. She hasn’t actually answered the question, has she? Despite the fact that both Jacob and I have asked.

As she clicks off the burner on the stove, I take a step toward her, scanning her posture, trying to figure out what my subconscious is picking up on. “What do you want?”

“Give me a little more time to gather my thoughts, and we can get into that.”

Engel gives me another smile, but the scent that catches in my nose at the same time makes me freeze in my tracks.

She sounds calm, and she’s acting as if she’s glad we’re here, but she’s giving off an unmistakable tang of stress. If she isn’t worried about the guardians crashing in on us, and she isn’t worried about us hurting her, then what could be wrong?

I drag in a deeper breath, and recognition sets off a spike of alarm through my nerves.

It isn’t the same kind of stress I tasted from the guardians we’ve interrogated, sharply metallic with fear. It’s closer to the pungent anticipation I breathed in so many times in the fighting arena, from opponents both worried about my reputation—and determined to crush me.

Like she sees us as enemy combatants, ones she stands a real chance against.

But she isn’t fighting us—she wouldn’t stand a chance if she tried?—

Full understanding clicks in my head. She’s stalling. Because she’s waiting for something else.

Before my thoughts have quite caught up with me, I’m spinning around. I dart across the living room to the chair where she was sitting when we first came in.

My fingers dip between the chair arm and the table where hers did in that brief, odd gesture I couldn’t make sense of and then forgot—and catch on the edge of a button hidden beneath the lip of the table.

Engel’s posture stiffens. I whirl around toward the guys.

“There’s a control here—it’s got to activate some kind of alarm system. She’s signaled for someone to come.”

All of the guys immediately jerk into defensive stances. Jacob’s gaze turns searingly cold.

“Who did you?—”

Before he can even finish spitting out the question, a swarm of dark-clothed figures swing into view from above and smash straight through the high windows in a shower of shattered glass.